Posted 26 September 2012 - 01:49 PM

Hi, so after losing some files recently I started looking into setting up Time Machine on a couple of laptops, so that they back up to an SMB share on a low power Windows 7 Embedded box I have.

After reading various articles on the internet and an old guide on this forum for Snow Leopard (http://www.insanelym...-network-share/) I have been able to get backups working via these steps:

Created sparsebundle called “Backup” for my machine, moved it across to the Windows share the backup will go to.
Changed the setting to allow Time Machine backups to unsupported devices.
Opened and mounted the sparsebundle via SMB in Finder
Run tmutil to set Time Machine to backup to this mounted sparsebundle, eg. /Volumes/Backup

The problem I have is that unless I manually mount the sparsebundle, Time Machine just says it will backup when the backup device is next connected, is there a way of getting Time Machine to automatically mount the sparsebundle whenever it wants to make a backup, and then unmounting it when finished?

As an attempted work around I created an AppleScript app to run the process of mounting the sparsebundle on logon, which appeared to work, but whenever my machine goes to sleep the backup share is disconnected. It isn’t a massive problem for me, but my partner doesn’t shut their laptop down much (just closes lid), so this would lead to backups not being taken on this machine often.

I also saw that in some guides it says to name the sparsebundle machinename_macaddress, but no explanation as to why this has to be done, is this something that could help me?

Posted 05 October 2012 - 12:37 PM

eep357

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Well one possible solution would be to use TimeMachineEditor.app to set you backups for certain times. You could then use automator along without your Apple Script to have it run at the same times as well, but a few minutes before.